


Swallow hard

by paradiso



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Drama, F/M, Five Times, M/M, Present Tense, UST, Unrequited Love, invented backstory, more like sexuality really, very very non-graphic sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 20:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4934752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paradiso/pseuds/paradiso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If you don’t receive love from those who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it” or, five times Rafael doubts his heart, one time his heart puts up a fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swallow hard

**Author's Note:**

> Writing/posting fic makes me so damned antsy and nervous, blegh. I realise there should be more Spanish in the first part but I’d rather not make an ass out of myself with google translate, so.

 

_i_

 

By the time Rafael is twelve, he has gone more than five years without saying _I love you_ , in Spanish or otherwise. He guesses it has been five years, which means he would’ve been seven the last time he whispered those words in the shell of his mother’s ear, perhaps. He doesn’t remember being seven very well, and it’s the lack of clarity, the tears in his memory that suggest to him that seven was his last year of ignorance and the accompanying bliss.

 

At twelve, Rafael has an astounding memory. It comes in handy. On the nights when both his parents work and Rafael is left with two younger siblings who need tucking-in and one older sibling who needs to study for an impending calculus test (or history, or English, or the tried and true methodologies of sneaking out to see a girl), the task of the customary bed-time story falls to him. He can recount all sorts of tales from his own tucking-ins as a seven year old – but it doesn’t matter, they _always_ seem to want the one about the eggs and the ham and Sam-I-Am.

 

“Not in a house. Not with a fox. Not with a mouse…” Rafael finishes in a whisper when he realizes both sets of eyes are closed.

 

He pulls the shared comforter up around them, then retreats to his own bed and continues, “Say. In the dark? Here in the dark. Would you, could you, in the dark.”

 

He finishes. Then does the _Cat in the Hat. The Lorax_.

 

Sick of rhymes, he starts _Where the Wild Things Are_.

 

He hears the front door open, close to eleven. A strip of light appears beneath his bedroom door for a moment and then disappears. The floors creak.

 

“Why are you awake still?”  he hears his father’s coarse voice, thick with weariness, “Rafael?”

 

“Is Mami home yet?” Rafael counters softly.

 

“It’s a school night, Rafael.”

 

“Okay,” the boy gives up, “I just wanted to say goodnight.”

 

“Now you’ve said it.”

 

The door closes all the way. Rafael feels his eyes start to grow heavy, “Goodnight,” he whispers into his own comforter, pulled up against his nose. He tries to say the second part, but the words don’t feel right in his mouth. He looks at his younger brother, eyes having adjusted well in the dark. He imagines him awake and running around, it might be easier then.

 

But the words don’t come. It distresses him. He feels sleep writhe away from his grasp as he wonders, _What’s wrong with me_. He hears it a lot, _I love you_. At school, in the morning when he’s turning the corner and the other kids’ parents are dropping them off. He asked his parents to do that once.

 

“ _Why, Rafi? It’s a ten minute walk.”_

 

When he’s older, he understands that it wasn’t neglect or for lack of love that no one ever held him close and whispered sweet things in his ear. When he’s older he understand that with five jobs and four children between the two of them, his parents had exactly eleven minutes per day per child, usually over food. And those eleven minutes were spent instilling morals and virtues the value of which were beyond him at that age. When he’s older, he wonders if he would’ve traded one meal a day for an extra half-hour with his father.

 

When he’s older, at her husband’s funeral, his mother tries to put some thirty odd years of awkward family get-togethers aside and says, “Your father loved you all, so much.”

 

“I know,” says Rafael, biting back resentment, he wonders why he feels ripped off.

 

His mother peers, “We couldn’t let you starve.”

 

When he’s older, he understands.

 

For now, he’s twelve. He hasn’t said _I love you_ in five years.

 

_ii_

 

His brothers both agree it’s weird he has never had a girlfriend. His sister shakes her head whenever they bring it up, laughing.

 

“Shut up,” she says, “Rafi’s smart. He’s focusing on school, unlike you two idiots. Nothing better to do than rag on your brother.”

 

“You’re making it worse,” Rafael mutters.

 

The laughter goes on for some time, before they’re hauled into the kitchen to help with dinner. Rafael takes his watch off, uses it as a weight on one of the pages of the social sciences textbook in front of him so that the breeze from the living room window doesn’t turn the page. He smiles to himself as he does so. In their old apartment they’d had just enough room for a couch and a small, dilapidated television set. This new place had space for a table. His older brother had wanted it for the nights when he had his friend’s over for poker and drinks.

 

“I can use it to study,” Rafael had told his mother, and won the rights instantly.

 

He could lose himself for hours there, sometimes not even noticing the sun’s setting until his mother comes in on her way to bed to shut the window, “It’s so drafty in here, how can you focus? You’re going to catch a cold!”

 

The wind brings him some clarity through the window though, so he goes on dutifully opening it at 6 o’ clock in the evenings, determined to keep his average high.

 

Today Rafael is seventeen and he’s about to fall in love for the very first time.

 

The breeze carries in a sound. Like a jet airliner crossing overhead, loudest when it’s directly above. Laughter – it’s starts off soft and then blossoms in a raging storm. He hasn’t heard it before, it’s distinct and of no particular gender. He stops reading and looks up and out of his window. But all he sees is the out-of-control rose bush the previous owners neglected to trim regularly.

 

Annoyed, he rises from his seat, turns the corner and is in such a hurry to the front door he nearly runs into his grandmother. She scolds him but he can’t hear her. He’s dodging the unpacked boxes in the hallway – they haven’t been here long and it’s impossible to tell what boxes contain the good cutlery so his mother has announced that nothing shall be moved until she finds them. He grunts as he trips over the corner of a box, the edge pushing into his shin. But he doesn’t feel the pain. He’s out on his porch.

 

He looks right, and sees their new street, filled with possibilities, stretching onwards into a perfect September sunset, complete with cloudless sky and children, emancipated from their evening chores cycling up and down the street.

 

He looks left and he sees Yelina.

 

It’s as though the sun suddenly changes its mind and races back across the sky to set in the east. Either that or he’s been standing on his front porch all night and the sun is coming up behind her, filling her hair with bronze and carnelian. She’s still laughing, and the sound hits him at full force. It gets louder and louder and then stops when she notices him staring. He knows the polite thing to do is to look away, or perhaps pretend he’s looking behind her. But he can’t. He looks straight into her eyes.

 

Yelina, unused to being challenged by skinny, Cuban boys of more or less her age doesn’t skip a beat as she crosses her driveway, cuts across the grass and stomps up the pavement steps to size him up. He stands an inch and a half shorter than her (not promising) but there’s a tenderness about him, she notes.

 

“I am Yelina,” she says, “What’s your name?”

 

“Rafael.”

 

“Your family just moved here?”

 

“Yes.”

 

She sits down on one of the steps, “Been here my whole life.”

 

This is how Yelina, the girl next door, becomes his best friend. They spend the afternoons together, raising eyebrows all over the neighbourhood. It isn’t that she’s the first pretty girl Rafael has ever seen, but she’s the first one who makes him feel lightheaded. When he’s with her, the world seems to shrink around them. She shows him around East Harlem, where to go, where to steer clear, and he doesn’t have the heart to tell her that his old apartment is just a few streets away from where they live now. He ignores many a scandalized glance as they come up the street just before dark on Saturday.

 

“Come to my house, it was Ana’s first communion two days ago, we have plenty of leftovers,” she leans her shoulder into his.

 

“Can’t,” he sighs, “We always eat together on Saturday,” but he gives her a look so she knows he’s truly regretful.

 

Her eyes shine, “Such a good son.”

 

He drags his feet as they approach his house. Today she showed him a parkette behind an old city hydro building, _“It’s a good place to go… if you ever want to be alone.”_ Rafael’s hands sweat and he lets himself fall two steps behind her, so he can watch her thick, heavy hair beat against her shoulders.

“Rafael!” a voice calls from the darkness.

 

Yelina jumps a little in shock and freezes. As a reflex, Rafael puts his hand on her arm softly.

 

Eddie steps out into the light. He’s been sitting on the steps, but the porch light is out, “Whoa,” he regards Yelina and then looks to Rafael, “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, or your friend.”

 

A light flicks on in the darkened porch, behind the ratty door, his sister appears in the window, “Hurry it up Rafael! Dinner!”

 

The light reveals the rest of the porch: the old swing his grandmother sometimes sits on, a few orange mums in planters, and Alex Muñoz, square-shouldered and sharp-eyed, standing in the very spot where Rafael was when he first laid eyes on Yelina. Now they have another shared memory.

 

“Is this who you’ve been blowing us off for?” Eddie nods at Yelina but laughs to let them know he means no harm, “Can’t say I blame you.”

 

Yelina smiles, “Hi,” then nudges Rafael.

 

He withdraws his hand from her arm but remains shoulder-to-shoulder with her, “This is Yelina.”

 

Alex walks down the stairs, Rafael doesn’t know why, but he draws in a breath and holds it. Alex is his oldest friend, he’s known him longer even than Eddie. At that moment Rafael feels a rush of emotions, but above all he is apprehension, and he doesn’t understand why he feels like he needs to step between Yelina and his friends.

 

As usual, Alex breaks the tension, “Hello Yelina. I’m Alex.”

 

“Rafael!” his sister pokes her head out the front door, “Come _on_!”

 

He smiles at Yelina, nods at his friends, then brushes past them and up to the door.

 

“It’s dark,” he hears Alex say, “Let’s walk you home.”

 

\--

 

A few weeks later, Rafael sees them coming up the street, shoulder-to-shoulder. He can still see the bronze in her hair. Alex puts his arm around her as they come to her house.

 

“Hey! Rafi!” Alex shouts from Yelina’s driveway, the same driveway she crossed that first day she met Rafael.

 

Rafael feels a discomfort rise in his chest like his heart is trying to climb up into his mouth. An itch that he needs to reach down his throat in order to get to. His fist tightens.

 

“You alright?” Yelina shouts, laughter still in her voice from whatever it was she’d been talking about with Alex a few moments before.

 

Rafael nods at them and ambles down his steps. As he continues down the street, he knows if he turns his head to the left and just barely looks over his shoulder he can see them kiss – her porch light was always working.

 

He goes to the parkette to be alone, like she said.  He doesn’t notice the sun going down. He misses dinner.

 

_iii_

 

It takes him a few years to recover, but that’s only because there’s a few distractions – undergraduate, law school, his older brother’s wedding, then his younger brother, Alex and Yelina… he’s twenty-seven when he starts to wonder if the whole three-times-a-bridesmaid thing applies to the groomsmen as well.

 

Multiple ill-suited blind dates and the occasional awkward you’re-really-sweet-but conversations point to _yes, absolutely, Rafael you’re going to be alone forever_.

 

So he does what everybody else does in their twenties, gives up on happily-ever-after and for a few months, sleeps with just about anyone who falls into his bed.

 

Tonight it’s a dark-eyed, shaggy-haired law clerk. He’d been making eyes at Rafael from across the diner where they both lunched occasionally. Subtle shyness having long since given up on him and moved on to exert its influence on other good Catholic boys, nothing stands in the way of Rafael inviting himself to dine with the older man.

 

One thing leads to another.

 

“That… was nuts,” Rafael says, partly to himself, only vaguely aware of the comforter bunched beneath his back.

 

His partner chuckles, then swings his legs over the side of the bed. Rafael has his eyes closed, so he doesn’t notice the other man dressing himself, not hurriedly, but intently, until he hears a zipper being drawn up.

 

He opens his eyes, vision taking a moment focus, “You’re leaving already?”

 

“You don’t really look like you have another round in you.”

 

“Give me some credit.”

 

“I think I gave you _more_ than enough.”

 

Rafael chuckles, “I only need a few minutes. Come back here.”

 

“I’m dressed already.”

 

Without thinking, “Come back tomorrow?”

 

The man regards him a moment. Rafael feels… naked beneath his gaze. He _is_ naked, but that’s not anything new. He’s been naked with more people than he’s willing to admit (even to himself), during all times of day in this apartment, so many miles away from home, so many miles away from the person he used to be.

 

“Look,” says his companion, sitting down on the bed, “I’m not that much older than you but…”

 

“But?”

 

A smirk, “Cover up.”

 

“What?”

 

The man yanks the comforter from under Rafael and then tosses it over his naked form then says, “You probably shouldn’t sleep around so much.”

 

“I’m safe. We were safe. Anyway, how did you–“

 

“I’ve watched you.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“It’s not like that. Don’t get any ideas. I’ve seen you around. The town’s not that big.”

 

“There’s literally thousands of students crawling around.”

 

“You would know.”

 

“ _Excuse_ me?”

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Rafael but– “

 

“Rafael,” he reaches out with his right hand, turns his palm outwards and runs his knuckles down Rafael’s face, against his jaw, then curves his hand around again so it eventually comes to lie flat against his chest, where a heart is squirming around, “Be patient with yourself.”

 

“What the hell? You are the _weirdest_ lay.”

 

The man smiles and his eyes shine knowingly when Rafael _gulps_ , swallowing something heavy.

 

“I’m not saying you have to stop doing what you do Rafael. You do whatever it is that makes you happy. But _are_ you happy?”

 

“I… what? Why are you talking like this?”

 

The man is silent. Rafael sits up and squints at him. His heart beats faster as the man gets up to leave. He tries to get out of bed to follow, but can’t find his boxers and is suddenly very conscious of himself.

 

He doesn’t normally take to sanctimonious monologues like that, despite having penned several volumes worth of closing statements, but Rafael isn’t really sure if that’s what that was.

 

When he’s clothed again, he lies back in bed and his contaminated mind starts drawing parallels, like it always does. In the coming days, he tries to regain the rhythm he has become accustomed too, but it’s hopelessly loss. He’s forced to think about all the times he has looked too deeply into a stranger’s eyes while their bodies are connected, wondering if those shared gazes when everything is too hot and too sweet are the only reason he bothers with it at all. To feel connected to another human being in such an intimate way, that there _must_ be at least one moment during the entire exchange when they can both believe that the world isn’t an entirely cruel place, and that people aren’t meant to live solitary lives.

 

A few times, Rafael even finds himself thinking, _Who is this person? Could I love this person? If I loved this person, could I tell this person I loved them?_

“Yes,” he says to himself, but once again with the burden of proof on himself and no evidence to show, he is simply forced to believe. He buries the matter.

 

_iv_

 

He’s used to falling in love hard and fast, almost instantaneously – a curse, that contradicts most of his other personality traits. He’s careful and concise in all other aspects of his life, he has to be. He sees the dangers of leaping before he looks, he sees this affliction bringing him to ruin again as it has in the past over and over.

 

He prays for a slow, languid descent into love, should he ever be so lucky as to look left one day and see the sun rise against another face. He wishes for a love that doesn’t feel like it’s conditioned – after all these years, he wants a damn say in deciding who will break his heart next.

 

The grass isn’t always greener.

 

Olivia and her squad tumble into his life like landslide and wreak just about as much havoc. It’s not like he’s squeamish, one can’t be _squeamish_ prosecutor – it’s just that, he thinks he’s seen _most_ of the ugliness already… murder, murder-suicide, mass-shootings, one particularly memorable case of serial cannibalism…

 

“You wanna talk about it?” Olivia asks at some point during their second month working together.

 

“We _are_ talking about it.”

 

“Not the case. The cases. All of them.”

 

“You’re overestimating me just a smidge.”

 

“Rafael,” she chides gently, “I’ve been doing this for a long time–“

 

“Don’t use that line on me,” he means it to come out like a snap, but for some reason he can’t snap at her, ever.

 

She chuckles and Rafael’s tie starts to feel a little tight, “It’s rough around here. Doing this. I’m just making sure you’re okay.”

 

“I’m quite alright.”

 

Rafael goes back to reading over his interview questions for their vic. He feels Olivia’s gaze on him for a long seven minutes before finding looking up, “What?”

 

She smiles knowingly and shakes her head, which catches his attention. She’s _infuriating,_ all alight with patience, brown hair floating airily around her face even this late in the day – it’s just not natural.

 

His heart skips and he scratches just beneath the knot of his tie, _Not her_ , he thinks to himself, _please, please not_ – _”_

 

But he can’t control it. He’s only a few more weeks into his time with SVU and he knows their rapport is deepening, but can’t tell if it’s because she genuinely likes stopping by his office unannounced to make fun of his caffeine habit while also worsening it (how _does_ she know he takes it with cream and sugar in the mornings and black if it’s after four?) or if it’s because she wants to coerce him into taking whatever weak case that falls onto her desk. Which he finds himself doing more and more often.

 

No. She wouldn’t manipulate him.

 

Still, he feels something in him wane whenever she looks to him, big brown eyes – not a knockout beauty at a first glance, but if he spends a little time tracing the curve of her cheekbones…

 

It’s a slow descent alright, like quicksand. He’s immoveable when she smiles at him. She smiles at him a lot, sometimes even when it’s wildly inappropriate, when they’re discussing something brutal and inhuman. She smiles at him to bring him back from whatever dark place he’s gone off to. He used to be good at doing that himself, but it’s nice to have someone else’s help.

 

He can’t help himself.

 

“You ever been in love like that?” he asks her while their shoulder to shoulder, the cold providing pretence, his brain providing several unheeded warning signals.

 

It’s a nasty case, they’re all nasty, but this one is all coated in sticky feelings. Eighteen-year-old girl, in love, or thinks she’s in love with some lowlife, who thinks he can do whatever he wants. And she’s so in love, love, love (how many _times_ did that defense attorney use that word) with him that the jury’s going to lean in his favour and-

 

“Like the guy kills somebody, in front of me, but he sends me flowers, so I let it slide?”

 

He smiles, god, he hasn’t smiled so much since…

 

“Lauren Sullivan, eleventh grade,” the first name belongs to his housekeeper, the last name from a particularly forthcoming witness on a previous case, the face the same one he fell in love with on his porch when he was seventeen, “She could’ve massacred my entire family. I would’ve looked the other way,” At least that part is true.

 

But Olivia doesn’t buy it. She’s never been a fool in love, he wishes he could say the same. He tries to keep the conversation going all the way back to the courthouse on purpose. He tries to pick up on a note of nostalgia or wistfulness in her voice, maybe thinking about her first kiss or the last time she ever told someone she loved them. But Olivia doesn’t budge, and he’s disappointed because he wants to see how she looks when she’s in love, he wants to know if her eyes shine ever more than they do when she smiles at him, at her squad. He wants to know if she can be any more beautiful than she is right now, in the cold, her arm brushing against his casually. How can she be so warm? Can she be warmer at night, wearing less, smiling less…

 

He wants to know all this and more about her, he’s scared this is the only way he’ll ever find out. He knows better than to get his hopes up.

 

Olivia is brave and kind and strong and that’s always been his type. He knows it’s real with her because his desire for self-preservation loses out against his desire to be around her, have her arm brush against his some other time.

 

He doesn’t know why he can’t tell her Yelina’s name – maybe it feels like betrayal to him. Betraying a love that was never realized, casting bad luck on an already impossible situation. A few months later and he’s grateful for Lauren Sullivan’s spur-of-the-moment role as the girl he loved when he was seventeen.

 

He comes to love Olivia with an older, less naïve heart. But he still pushes it down.

 

She never asks. He never tells her.

 

_v_

 

It’s a few months later, and Rafael thinks that this is what the end of his world looks like:

 

The press does its job and drags his oldest friend through the mud, his wife and children swept along with him.

 

Rafael tries to justify himself but it’s a world of grey and he’s not sure where he stands, right or wrong, with the people of the state of New York vs. Alejandro Muñoz or the people he’s always called his family.

 

A tale of two cities, the reverend says, and Rafael couldn’t agree more, knows his hunched figure is somewhere in the crowd in the picture on the front of the Times on the steps of the courthouse, but can’t find himself. Not even when Yelina shoves it in his face, almost down his throat to join his heart, simmering in guilt.

 

“Do you see this?” she screeches.

 

“I really can’t discuss this-“ he says in a low tone. They’re in the hallway outside of his office. People are staring.

 

“You can’t _discuss_ this? Are you enjoying this?”

 

Rafael exhales long and slow, turns the knob to his office and barely moves out of the way in time to avoid her slamming into him as she barrels inside. He shuts it behind them, tries to give himself a moment to pray before she continues the onslaught.

 

“How could you… ” she starts out loud, and Rafael recoils, knowing what’s coming next is worse than being hit.

 

She collapses into his chair – literally, _his_ chair, not one of the empty ones he keeps out for visitors, the one behind his desk where he’d been sitting the last time she came here. All these years later, she’s still comfortable in his house.

 

“My whole life…” she whimpers, it’s a terrible sound, “You couldn’t just let me live a lie?”

 

He approaches her, remembers reading somewhere that you should never tell someone bad news standing up. He tries for one of the others chairs but it’s just too absurd…talking to her from a chair in front of his desk, like he’s the victim and she’s the one trying to fight for justice.

 

So he goes around the desk, kneels, “I wish it was another way.”

 

“Really?” she looks up, her eyes have been red for days probably, but now they’re wet again, and he can’t help it, he feels responsible, “You wish Alex was mayor, you wish that our marriage wasn’t… “

 

He takes her shaking hands in his, they’re cool and caked with trails of salt, “You’re going to come back from this,” he says, “I know you.”

 

He drops her hands then and stands, sighing as he does so.

 

She asks the forbidden question, the one that’s been in her eyes since they were twenty-one and saying goodbye at the train station before he left for college again. In her hips as he danced an obligatory dance with her the night of her wedding, all the muscles in his body screaming. In her smile the night she first asked him to spare her husband, her family…

 

“Do you still…”

 

She trails off when his eyes narrow at her. They’ve always been soft whenever he looks at her, but now they’re alert, and so bright and so full of… sympathy. She isn’t used to being looked at like that.

 

“You should go, be with your husband.”

 

She sniffs, tucks her hair behind her ears. Small gestures that have in the past held so much power over him… do they still?

 

He wonders, he reaffirms, he doubts. He can have her now, if he wants. She’s within reach again, for the first time since they were seventeen. He tries to listen to his heart but it’s quiet, so quiet, does it even beat?

 

_vi_

 

He’s comfortable with being older now because he’s pretty sure he was born forty.

 

He drinks more now than he used to, but he watches the sugar and the carbs, alternatively depending on what day it is. He indulges the casual interest in fashion he’d had when he was younger, since now he has the funds for it. And if he ever gets lonely, which he does albeit less and less since he joined SVU, it’s nothing either a cold shower or a warm few extra minutes in bed can’t fix (alternatively… depending on what day it is).

 

Some days he’s up early, trading barbs with Amaro as they wait for Benson to arrive. In that past he has avoided talking to Nick to much, they have enough in common that Rafael worries he might actually accidentally let the detective see a shred of his humanity. Can’t have that with people he works with. Except for…

 

He’s been working on getting comfortable with Olivia again. Recognizing that he can’t just shove her away and expect that to not alarm her and make her an even bigger presence in his life, he does his best to keep his lingering gazes to a minimum.

 

Thing is, those lingering gazes become like the faint of smell of cilantro in his abuelita’s house. He’s so used to it he doesn’t even notice until Olivia points it out to him when they’re standing in the bedroom where she died last week.

 

“She cook often?” she says to him, soberly, but trying to lift the mood.

 

“Come hell or high water,” he laughs a little, but his sorrow betrays him and he ends up having to blink hard to avoid crying, “Despite my mother’s best efforts.”

 

He sits down on a box filled with encyclopaedias, dictionaries… relics.

 

Olivia slides to the ground against the opposite wall. He knows she’s tired from the week, the case. She rests her elbows on her raised knees and lets her fingers fall limp, hair still maddeningly wispy and light on her shoulders. Her eyes droop but her long lashes make them look wide awake and–

 

She’s staring directly at him.

 

Like the smell of cilantro, he can’t tell how long he’s been looking at her. But Olivia notices. Olivia notices everything, maybe even notices that it’s not the first time he stared at her brazenly, following the tendrils of her hair as they brush against her shoulders.

 

She wants to call him on it, but says instead, about his grandmother, “Only right for you to love her like you did. She seems like quite the woman.”

 

Rafael looks up, sees Olivia smiling cautiously, in a way that is unlike her. Amidst the fragrance of the apartment, he can feel her scent tickle his senses. They’ve had moments like this before, and Rafael can’t bring himself to hope, can’t bring himself to wonder if maybe his losing streak is coming to an end. Maybe there’s a chance, somewhere in this room, for him to learn to say _I love you_ and maybe even if she doesn’t say it back, maybe she’ll just let it be for the moment. He feels himself tugged in two directions, can’t bring himself to go in either one. He’s been here so many times before, feeling so many ways about a person and unable to voice anything. His blood surges, and there’s no slowing it, _come on, Rafael, are you happy? Don’t you want to be happy?_

 

His heart creeps up his throat, into his mouth. For once, instead of swallowing, he opens, lets himself breathe:

 

“So are you.”

 

**fin**

 

September 2015 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
